Quasimodos, mocked cyclists and The Donkey: The origins of Italian football club nicknames

What’s in a nickname?

That is a question The Athletic has been answering this week as we trace the origins of football clubs’ monikers in England, Germany, France, Spain and the rest of the world.

This time, we’re looking at the nicknames — flattering and otherwise — in Italian football.

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More on the intriguing world of nicknames in football…

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Let’s begin with a deep cut. A lombata if you’re familiar with Italian butchery. Rivalries in Italy take the country’s flair for nicknames to tender and tasty places. It’s not enough to know the colour scheme of a jersey (Biancocelesti, Rossoneri, Giallorossi), a local landmark (a fountain, a volcano, sometimes both) or a spirit animal (Ascoli‘s is the woodpecker) to appreciate their flair for nicknames.

You need to really get under the skin.

Sampdoria, for instance, have arguably the most beautiful jersey not just in Italy, but the world. There’s no sash, no stripes, no checks. The blue base layer with the white, red and black hoop (Blucerchiato) is unique in football.

To neighbours Genoa, however, their ‘cousins’ do not belong in this sport. They deridingly call them ciclisti. That’s right. Cyclists because the jersey resembles the kind of garb Fausto Coppi used to wear as he wound his way up the Stelvio Pass. (In retaliation, Samp fans look at the mythological griffin on Genoa’s old crest with the same disdain Roma supporters show when faced with Lazio’s imperial eagle. They both mock these proud-winged creatures as a piccione; a shabby pigeon.)

Staying with Roma, they are nicknamed La Magica (isn’t it magical at the Olimpico when they’re playing?) or Lupi, the wolf being as prevalent in Italian football as foxes are in London gardens. The she-wolf and her place in the Eternal City’s origin story is the pack leader of lupi in Italy — better than those of Avellino, Cosenza and the one pawing underneath an oak tree on Lecce’s badge.

Lecce, incidentally, are better known as the Salentini for the stretch of the Otranto coastline on Italy’s heel. Puglia is home to Foggia as well, whose nickname is the Satanelli or Little Satans, a variation of AC Milan’s nickname the Diavolo for whom the club’s founder Herbert Kilpin is to thank. A Nottingham lad, Kilpin promised Milan would be a team of devils, “red like fire and black like the fear we’ll invoke in our opponents”.

San Siro room-mates Inter are characterised by the Biscione, a basilisk that somehow slithered its way off the coat of arms of some Milanese nobles. When Inter signed Darko Pancev, a European Cup-winning forward from Red Star Belgrade in 1992, it seemed like a marriage made in heaven as he was called the Cobra, but his performances at the Giuseppe Meazza were so venom-less he quickly became referred to as Ramarro; the grass snake.

Inter, for what it’s worth, also go by Beneamata (well-loved or fondly thought of) although it would be wrong to suggest they are thought of that way in Turin where their bitterest enemies reside. Inter fans aren’t the only ones to adapt Juventus to Rubentus and create a neologism out of the verb rubare, which means to steal.

Torino fans claim their team is more rooted in Turin — much like Manchester City fans do with Manchester — and this Maroon Eleven identify with the city’s icon, a prancing bull, as their spirit animal. In addition to Rubentus, fans of Il Toro will lean into calling Juventus hunchbacks or Gobbi, as will Fiorentina, a reference to Juventus kits from the 1950s that billowed at the back and made their players look like Quasimodos who, in Italian folklore, are considered absurdly lucky.

More charitable and less contested names for Juventus will follow. It’s not her fault if the Girlfriend of Italy, as the club is also known, attracts as much envy as she does love.

Don’t worry, though, she can handle herself, as can Atalanta, a heroine and huntress from Greek mythology. Quite how the Dea (Goddess) has let Bournemouth copy her look without releasing an arrow in anger is a mystery.

For a region that gave Italy its unifying language, Tuscany isn’t particularly verbose, at least when it comes to nicknames for its clubs. Fiorentina are simply known as the Viola (purple), Empoli the Azzurri (blues), Pisa the Nerazzurri (black and blues; why not the Towers?!). Livorno occasionally go by the Triglie, literally the Mullets, although this is a reference to one of the city’s most famous dishes, which features red mullet (and shares in the colour of their jerseys) rather than the hairstyle.

Crossing the Apennines into Emilia-Romagna, the relatively few enthusiasts for Etruscan civilisation in commentary booths talk about Bologna as the Felsinei, an ancient sect probably responsible for some of the artefacts dug up by the troubled British archaeologist-turned-looter in Alice Rohrwacher’s recent arthouse film La chimera.

When Parma were workshopping a jersey in 1914, the founders settled on the city’s links with the Crusades rather than classical music and Giuseppe Verdi. And so the cross they bear is one of the go-to monikers people reach for — Crociati — when they aren’t calling them the Gialloblu (the yellow and blues).

Another team in those colours, Hellas Verona, is spoken about as the Butei although you won’t find any peach emojis on their social media. Butei is Veneto-dialect for ‘the lads’ and it isn’t Hellas’ only nickname. Their crest is like that of Verona’s medieval rulers, the Scalas, showing a ladder (literally a Scala, hence their nickname Gli Scaligeri) and a couple of fierce-looking mastiffs (Mastini, another of their nicknames).

Elsewhere, Cagliari have been anointed the team of Sardinia, no matter the protests from Olbia or Torres, which means they are either known by the local dialect name of their city Casteddu or simply as the Sardi or Sardinians. Up by the Slovenian border, Udinese are also proud representatives of their region, Friuli, so you’ll hear Friulani more than Zebrette, which indicates the Zebra-like stripes they have in common with Juventus who we return to, along with some of the other interestingly nicknamed clubs, below.

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Juventus

Nickname: La Vecchia Signora (The Old Lady)

You can see her behind the goal at the Allianz Stadium, twirling in the Scirea end. Lady Juventus. The Contessa. The Nonna. Depicted in a flag held up by one of the banner-men among the ultras, she means different things to different people.

How she came to be identified with a club whose name is Latin for ‘youth’ is one of life’s paradoxes. But when the Agnelli family bought the team a century ago, it felt like Italy’s girlfriend, as Juventus were also known for their popularity, became a lady. Whether she has aged gracefully over the years is in the eye of the beholder.

The club’s tendency, in the past, to have a veteran core and faithful servants who played into their forties meant a nickname needed to counterbalance the dissonance with the actual name. However, the recent contributions from their Next Gen reserves in the first team have ensured Juventus are truer to their original moniker than ever before.

Venezia

Nickname: The Lagunari (Lagooners)

Venezia could perhaps have been called l’Arsenale. The city was famous, at least until the Corsican who gave his name to short-man syndrome pillaged it, for the armoury that weaponised ships for the various doges to annex large swathes of the Dalmatian coast and islands of the Ionian and Aegean seas. But Venezia was the name some gymnasts settled on when they decided to swap parallel bars for goalposts and form a football club in 1907.

Still, an unintentional hat-tip to Arsenal lives on in Venezia’s sobriquet. As with other football clubs up and down Italy, yet weirdly not Como — who should be known as the Lakers — a landmark is used in association. In this case, it’s the Venetian lagoon on which Vaporettis speed to the islands of Murano and Burano. Instead of the Gooners, Venezia are the Lagunari instead — the ‘Lagooners’.

Napoli

Nickname: O Ciuccio (The Donkey)

You will almost always hear Napoli referred to as the Partenopei. This goes back to the city’s origin story as an Ancient Greek settlement by the name Partenope, which is the title of the Neapolitan film director Paolo Sorrentino’s upcoming film. But in the rust bowl that is the Maradona, it is not uncommon to see the club’s spirit animal: a braying, flea-bitten donkey known, in local dialect, as O Ciuccio.

Back in the day, Napoli’s first, rather ornate crest featured a horse prancing on a football. Think of a less iconic version of the Ferrari one. Terrible in their inaugural season as a club — Inter thrashed Napoli 9-2 then Juventus gave them an 8-0 hiding — it has passed into folklore that, one day, a group of fans were standing in Bar Pippone lamenting Napoli’s latest defeat when a local rag-and-bone man walked past with a donkey pulling a cart. “Prancing horse,” they scoffed. “Yeah right! More like Fechella’s donkey with his sores and his festering tail.”

A reporter at the Corriere del Mezzogiorno picked up on fans calling the team a donkey while covering games and committed the nickname to print. All of a sudden Fechella’s mule became beloved so much so that he was paraded around the pitch after Napoli came back from 2-0 down to draw 2-2 against Juventus in 1930. The team of Ferrari’s future owners Fiat, Juventus, with all their horsepower, had miraculously been caught by a donkey.

O Ciuccio has inspired ‘hit’ songs like this from when Napoli regained their top-flight status and began to qualify for Europe again under current owner Aurelio De Laurentiis.

O Ciuccio is not to be confused with the Flying Donkeys of Chievo Verona. In other ass-related sobriquets, this one came about when Chievo, a team from a suburb of Verona, incredibly began climbing up the Italian football pyramid. Fans of Hellas, the 1985 Scudetto winners, liked to say donkeys would fly before they played a derby in Serie A. But in 2001, it happened and although Chievo lost the first one, they won the next Derby della Scala and finished an incredible fifth in their debut season in the top flight.

Benevento

Nickname: The Sorcerers

Shakespeare set 10 of his plays in Italy. He could perhaps have staged Macbeth in Benevento. “Double, double, toil and trouble” resembles this supposed spell from the Campanian town: “Nguento, ‘nguento, manname a lu nocio ‘e Beneviento, sott’a ll’acqua e sotto o viento, sotto a ogne maletiempo.” Stories about a coven of witches gathering underneath a walnut tree in Benevento have been passed down since the 13th century. They’d steal horses and fly around, however, these necromancers suffered a blow in the 1940s when a bridge they supposedly used to get airborne was destroyed during World War II.

Still, it didn’t stop them from being a complete nuisance. Locals would pour a goal line of salt along the threshold of their house or lay a broom across it to stop the janaras, as they were known, from entering. By the time they’d counted every grain or fibre, it would be sunrise and the witches were at risk of melting.

This seemed to explain why Benevento or, to give them their nickname the Sorcerers, lost their first 14 games in Serie A in 2017. The bright lights of Serie A were too much.

Crotone

Nickname: The Pythagoreans

Football is about angles and whether or not you can manipulate geometry to your advantage. It attracts philosophers and, more recently, nerds who come up with equations that explain the inexplicable, such as the value of various spaces in a rectangle. Unfortunately, none of this is relevant when telling the story of why Crotone are known as the Pitagorici or Pythagoreans.

As was the case with Naples and many other parts of the south of Italy and Sicily, Crotone was a Greek colony by the name of Kroton, which sounds like a planet on which superheroes are born. In fact, there is a crater on Mars named after this Calabrian town.

Before dying because he refused to run through a field of fava beans — if you’re wondering, they filled him with more mortal dread than the men Polycrates had sent in pursuit of him — the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras opened a school in Kroton.

It did not have the influence on Italian football that Coverciano did on the leafy outskirts of Florence (that’s where coaches do their badges in Italy) but Davide Nicola did manage the equivalent of solving one of those unsolvable math problems when 34 points somehow equalled an improbable top-flight survival in 2017.

(Top image: Designed by Eamonn Dalton)